Wynfrith was born in Wessex about 675 and given to a monastery as a boy. At Nursling, near Winchester, he became a respected teacher of Scripture and of Latin grammar and verse. In 716 he crossed to Frisia to preach, but war between the Frisians and the Franks closed the mission. Two years later he went to Rome, and in 719 Pope Gregory II sent him to the Germans under the name Boniface.
Consecrated a bishop in 722, he worked in Hesse and Thuringia, where he felled the sacred oak of Donar near Geismar and built a chapel from its timber. Pope Gregory III made him an archbishop in 732. With helpers from England, men and women alike, he founded monasteries, among them Fulda, organised dioceses in Bavaria and central Germany, and called councils to reform the Frankish clergy.
Boniface in the library (1 work)
- The English Correspondence of Saint Boniface — 8th century; translation 1911
Letters of the English missionary to Germany and his friends at home: the mission, its hardships, and the friendships that carried it.